As a programmer, I understand the difference between a technical problem and a political one.

Yes, we should use encryption to make it more difficult (less easy?) to spy on us, and quality software design practices, testing, code audits, etc, to make it less likely we will be the victims of data theft due to exploits. But to rely on technical solutions to protect us from government surveillance is to succumb to the same fallacy as the copyright lobby, relying on inherently flawed DRM principles and playing whack-a-mole with file sharing methods. You can never plug every leak.

I know I am not smart enough to outsmart the NSA. They have slightly more resources than I do. Slightly. They're on this 24/7. They have "legal" authority to do all sorts of things I would be thrown in a cell to rot for if I did them.

The only viable solution is a political one: change the laws to disallow the unacceptable activities of the surveillance state, with punishments for violating these rules. Until then, it's just an unwinnable arms race.

"All right, so we've been over your history. Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from MIT, 12 years at the JPL. Nice. Very nice. But now we separate the men from the boys." Pulls out dog-eared copy of Big Book of Riddles for 5th Graders. "Why did the elephant paint its toenails red?"

My favorite: If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft.

Of course then some smart ass will point out that the North Pole is covered in ice, and so is not technically by all possible definitions the surface of the earth. Somebody else in the comments made up a solution wherein it's anywhere you have a treadmill that can rotate.

Brain teasers as interview questions annoy me. Frequently because I think the interviewer (probably not Musk) is some jackass who heard Google or Microsoft gives people brain teasers, so they got a list off the internet and think they're doing their job by seeing if the applicant can get the "right" answer, which is probably the same one the applicant himself memorized before because he read the same list off the internet because they know people do this crap now, so it's all fucking pointless. If you approach it from the "let's see how this person works out a problem" thing, maybe it's valuable, but still, fuck you.

I think the best option is to make up a technically correct solution on the spot, and hope it's something original. I was once asked something like "how many quarters does it take to reach the top of the Empire State Building?" I'm guessing the clever answer is "four" as in, "four sections each 25% of the building by some measure probably height but an asshole could also say volume or mass or some dumb shit but it would still be four so who cares." Or you could try to do a Fermi estimation with the approximate height (deciding whether to call the "top" the observation deck or the highest spire) divided by the width or diameter of a US quarter dollar.

I googled ticket prices for the cheapest elevator ride to the top deck ($52) and said 214 quarters. 208 for the ticket, and then another $1.50 for a Coke when I reached the top.

(now queue some asshole telling me a Coke at the top of the Empire State Building will cost at least $3.25...)

I fucking hate brain teasers.

Counterpoint: I tried this with my Republican parents yesterday, and they were wary of ending marijuana prohibition because, well, if you make drugs legal, black people will no longer be able to sell drugs to make money, and will therefore break into their homes and rob them.

Tough to argue with that kind of logic.

But it's pretty trivial to follow instructions to set up a VPN. So I'm willing to bet a post made the rounds in Canadian "music sharing enthusiast" forums (also high schools, colleges) that read something like:

1) Download a bittorrent client that uses SOCKS v5 (I like Deluge).

2) Go to privateinternetaccess.com and pay them $6.95/month.

3) Go to Preferences in your bittorrent client and fill in the connection information from your VPN account into the SOCKS authentication fields in the "Proxy" tab.

4) Trade, uh, Linux ISO files and COMPLETELY LEGAL THINGS.

Just saying, if somebody gets a notice, they're going to go searching for a way to not get notices, and while "duh VPN" is something techy, it's not a hard script to follow.

"In an unrelated story, VPN services have seen a 3000% increase in Canadian customers."

Naturally. It would be ridiculous for the government to hold on to the GPS coordinates of the device, tracking your car's location at all times.

Now, the record of keep-alive packets between the device and the cell tower it's reporting the data to, well...that's just metadata.

I know. I'm talking about political talking points. Ask a Republican how they feel about "the nanny state." Reaction will be negative. Tie federal rules about what you can and can't smoke to "the nanny state" and they'll fall in line. It's all about spin and perception.

Yo dawg, I heard you like bombs...

NASA invented pussy? Man, is there anything awesome those guys didn't think up?!

I remember being in high school in 1995 and seeing a cover of National Review arguing for the legalization of marijuana. I don't see how it would be difficult to argue to Fox News viewers that drug legalization is a conservative opinion. Cite William F. Buckley. Less 'big government nanny-state nonsense' telling you what you can and cannot do. And state's rights! Each state or community should decide for themselves what intoxicants are and are not allowed in their borders without mandates from Washington. Plus it'll help with immigration, by cutting off funding to Mexican gangs, making Mexico less of a shit hole that people want to flee. And border patrol could spend more time looking for illegal people rather than illegal substances. Also, "good for business."

And I know, what they do now instead is say "but it's evil poison they're corrupting your children with!" I'm saying as a political tactic, all they have to do is stop saying that and say what I said in the first paragraph and I think Republicans could get right behind it. Ending prohibition fits right in with conservative philosophy.

Except I don't know anybody who said "ya know, I didn't hate blacks and gays when I was a kid, but the older I get, the more I'm bothered by shit that has absolutely nothing to do with me."

Yes, you may get more fiscally conservative the older you get, but few people get more socially conservative the older they get. Which is why the number of people with libertarian sympathies continues to grow.

I believe the elderly fools in the GOP represent the party mainstream because I have FaceBook.

My kingdom for mod points.